About

The legal department at Grupa Pracuj; a Polish internet firm focusing on the recruitment sector; has undergone significant changes in recent years, not only doubling its personnel, but also undergoing a significant restructuring process. Currently, the team consists of ten highly qualified specialists providing comprehensive legal assistance to the entire company’s capital group, in the fields of civil and commercial law, personal data protection, intellectual property and the law of new technologies and litigation, as well as domestic and foreign investment, acquisitions and restructuring processes. When asked about the most significant change in the team over the past couple of years, the department’s head of legal Anna Kamińska mentions a significant change in her team’s approach to the business and to clients, in its ambition to become a ‘a partner’ to the business rather than simply a legal advisor. ‘It required a lot of effort and a complete change in the attitude and the way of thinking’, Kamińska shares. ‘The team had to learn how to think and advise “outside of the box”, propose alternative, not always obvious solutions, and to be much more open to different points of view. I am convinced that we managed to create an excellent legal department closely cooperating with the business, significantly contributing to the competitive advantage achieved by the company in the market’, she adds. Among a significant amount of projects the team’s involvement in the implementation of GDPR rules to the company has had a particularly noteworthy impact, particularly because of the reliance of its business model on personal data and processing on a very large scale. ‘From the very beginning, we were involved in consulting any changes in products, services and IT systems in the entire organisation, negotiating changes to contracts with all our clients and suppliers, as well preparing internal procedures and policies’, Kamińska explains. ‘I also find it a great achievement that we managed to involve almost the whole organisation in the project and significantly increase the legal awareness of our employees in this area’. As a second major achievement, Kamińska mentions the team’s involvement in a very large foreign investment process: ‘Within this project it was necessary to coordinate the work of both lawyers and tax advisors from five different countries and at the same time five different legal systems (Poland, UK, Canada, Cyprus and Ukraine),’ she says. The team created a very complicated legal and tax structure, involving seven different legal entities, and had to showcase exceptional coordination and project management skills to close the transaction.